A: I have always been fascinated by cities and
how to “read” them – the layout of the street plan, the buildings, how the
urban landscape developed – and the ways in which people and communities live
in them, how neighbourhoods develop and how things change.

This meshed with my interest in the French
Revolution, which began many years ago while I was still studying at school. When
some of my family moved to Paris in the 1980s, I began to wonder what was left
of the city from the days of the revolution. One of my hobbies on visits was to
seek these places out.

At first, I thought about writing a short guide
book to revolutionary Paris and this simmered for a while. Years later, when
meeting colleagues for a drink in Paris after working in the Archives
Nationales, one of them (not an expert on the French Revolution) asked about
where, precisely, certain famous revolutionary events took place.

In answering these questions, it struck me that
it would be fun to write a book that set the upheaval and the characters
involved not just in a historical narrative, but also within a strong sense of
place.

Yet this begged the question: does physical
space – the topography, the buildings, the cityscape – actually have an impact
on revolutionary events? And, if so, how?

To understand this fully, I felt, it was
important to compare the experience of one revolution – the French – with
another (the American) and then to contrast both with a country that avoided
revolution (Britain). So I chose to write about Paris, London and New York in
the age of revolution.

Paris and London, I hope, are obvious choices,
but I chose New York (rather than Boston – one of my favourite cities anywhere
– or Philadelphia) because I know it best of all American cities and because it
experienced the successive transformations of revolution, occupation and
reconstruction (after the horrific fire of 1776) in a way the others did
not.

Q: What are some similarities in the way all
three cities experienced the age of revolution?

A: All three cities witnessed a dramatic
expansion of political participation – in New York, as the patrician Gouverneur
Morris put it, “the mob begin to think and reason.”

All cities saw the creation and expansion of
political organisations devoted to mobilizing a public – artisans, sailors,
workers – that went way beyond the traditional social and legal limits of those
who actually held power and authority. In many cases, women participated,
too.

All three cities witnessed violence, albeit to
varying degrees of intensity, in different ways triggered by the revolutionary
upheavals and wars that accompanied them.

In New York there was violence and repression by
patriots against loyalists, and then vice versa during the British military
occupation; in Paris there was crowd and state-sponsored violence against
opponents, real or suspected; in London the authorities lost control of parts
of the city for five days in June 1780 when rioters went on the rampage in
protest against measures to ease restrictions on Catholics.

All three cities also experienced revolutionary
warfare, albeit in different ways: New York and Paris with the direct
mobilization of people and resources in defence of the Revolution, London in
opposition to it.

All three cities saw energetic and conflicting propaganda
efforts by governments and their opponents to win “hearts and minds,” so that sites
where civil society operated, like coffee houses, taverns, publishing houses,
even theatres, became places where opposing sides mobilized – and where there
were struggles for control of these public spaces.

All three cities experienced political
repression, too, with the “Terror” in Paris being the most hard-hitting, but New
York saw surveillance, arrest, expulsions and expropriations of political
enemies at different stages and London experienced a determined campaign waged
by the government and its supporters against the incipient democratic
movement.

And all three cities were marked, physically, by
the political battles that arose, through the embellishment and adaptation of
existing buildings, as different sides tried to project their messages to the
wider public. This process was particularly weighty in Paris and New York, but
it can be traced in London, too.

Q: What are some of the key differences in how
the three cities reacted to the idea of revolution?

A: Crucially, London avoided a revolution
altogether (although at times it seemed like it did so only by the skin of its
teeth) – and I explore why this may have been the case in the book – whereas
Paris and New York were epicentres of the upheaval.

New York was the only city of the three to
experience military occupation – although Paris at times looked like a city under
siege, or at least a rear area town, particularly when the effects of the
French Revolutionary Wars were at their most intense in 1793-94, the year of
the “Terror.”

Ultimately, the differences in the experience of
these three cities, particularly in the 1790s, the decade of the French
Revolution and the war that accompanied it, help us to understand the different
paths the three countries at large took towards democracy.

Q: How did you research the book, and was there
anything that especially surprised you in the course of your work?

A: I did a lot of walking! I have kept the pair
of boots I (mostly) wore during my urban hikes: the soles are so thin that I
can now feel stray stones when I tread on them.

I wanted to get a feel for the topography and –
where they still existed – have a look at the buildings and streets that I
describe in the book. So I also compared maps – modern with the old ones – to
get a sense as to how the cities have changed between then and now.

But the main thrust of the research was the work
that all historians do, namely examining primary sources – archives (which are
always fun), published letters, memoirs, travelogues and travel guides, and so
on.

I also looked at images – contemporary
engravings, in particular – and considered using them as a source far more than
I did, but then I would have written a very different book had I done so. Instead,
I preferred to produce pen sketches of the places explored, and let the
reader’s imagination do its work.

What was particularly surprising for me was the
extent to which, in times of political upheaval, space and place were
essential, not just in terms of the physical control of strategic and symbolic
points, but also in the ways in which revolutionaries, in particular, put a
great deal of effort into using the urban environment to project their
messages, to make a statement that the new order was here to stay.

I cite many examples of this, but a good
American one was the development of New York’s Federal Hall for Congress when
the city was briefly the capital of the young United States. A French example,
more ephemerally, was the construction of a massive Phrygian bonnet (the famous
“red cap of liberty”) on top of what was once the royal palace of the
Tuileries. These things could also be very controversial.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Thanks for asking…I have several irons in the
fire. My books in the pipeline are threefold.

Firstly, there will be an academic volume on
revolutionary Paris (developing the work I’ve done for The Unruly City by
exploring one city in depth, taking the themes and the detail further, and
exploring different problems and theories).

Secondly, I’m sketching out what I hope will be
a fun book to write and to read, on Paris in the “Belle Époque,” so c. 1900,
exploring the ways in which the period experienced the frictions between the
old and the new (I’m a big fan of Eugen Weber’s wonderful book, France: Fin de
Siècle). I would ground each chapter in a description of a building, a place or
an object that visitors to Paris can still see and enjoy today.

Thirdly, I’m writing a “Concise History of
Europe” for Cambridge University Press (which, I hope, will be timely in the
atmosphere created by “Brexit”).

I’ve also got two collaborative writing projects
on the boil. With my good friend and colleague, Dr. Ben Marsh of the University
of Kent, I have co-edited a volume on “Understanding and Teaching the Age of
Revolutions,” which will be published soon by the University of Wisconsin Press.
It seeks to encourage teachers and students to try different approaches and to
explore different places across the Atlantic world, and how they experienced
revolution between the 1760s and 1830s.

Finally, but by no means least, I’m editing a
volume for Oxford University Press in its Handbook series, on Europe in the
Long Nineteenth Century.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I hope you enjoy reading The Unruly City! While
I hope it gets people looking at the cities in a different way (and, for those,
like myself, who don’t live in any of the three, perhaps their own city, town,
or village) – namely, as a physical place that bears witness, or memory, to
events and people in the past – I tried to write it primarily as a book to be
enjoyed.

About Me

Author, THE PRESIDENT AND ME: GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE MAGIC HAT, new children's book (Schiffer, 2016). Co-author, with Marvin Kalb, of HAUNTING LEGACY: VIETNAM AND THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY FROM FORD TO OBAMA (Brookings Institution Press, 2011).